Well, my tech-illiterate grandfather knows about this debate, and all he can understand is that the FBI has a terrorist's phone and Apple is obstructing their investigation.
He thought encryption was something we could easily ban, and he's a civil engineer. I walked him through it mathematically, then gave examples until he understood, but not everyone has a technical background.
We are losing because we aren't presenting an alternative public narrative.
We must educate the public on the necessity of strong encryption to the modern economy, and the danger of backdoors. Even getting them to imagine how the Soviets would have used this technology is usually enough to get the greatest generation and the boomers to at least think.
We won against the Clipper chip, munitions classifications, export grade encryption, 96-bit maximum key sizes, and SOPA.
The problem is people have a hard time of wrapping their head around the idea that an encryption backdoor, once created, is at extreme risk of being leaked to others and can not be contained.
This is something that I find is hard to explain to nontechnical people because it isn't intuitive of our understanding of the real world.
E.g. "If a bank can keep my money from being stolen, then surely you can keep this backdoor from being stolen, so stop complaining and just do it already!" -- As Trump would probably say when ordering it done, echoing the sentiments of many.
Point to TSA locks and the New York City master keys. Both systems are similar enough to encryption backdoors, and both systems have already been compromised.
He thought encryption was something we could easily ban, and he's a civil engineer. I walked him through it mathematically, then gave examples until he understood, but not everyone has a technical background.
We are losing because we aren't presenting an alternative public narrative.
We must educate the public on the necessity of strong encryption to the modern economy, and the danger of backdoors. Even getting them to imagine how the Soviets would have used this technology is usually enough to get the greatest generation and the boomers to at least think.
We won against the Clipper chip, munitions classifications, export grade encryption, 96-bit maximum key sizes, and SOPA.
We can win here.